Example data. Fieldnote is a fictional company used to fill all 61 boards, so the examples tell one consistent story.
Pre-PMF Fieldnote, first week: the whole team maps Léa after two ride-alongs in the van.
What the team took away
Three themes for the interview guide came out of this: paperwork after hours, trust about parts, and the schedule changing mid-morning.
How to run it
Preparation
Invite the whole team, including engineers. The point is that people who never meet users hear them for one hour.
Pick one user segment and one situation of use. One map per segment, never a map for 'users' in general.
Collect material beforehand: 3 to 5 interview extracts, support tickets, a screen recording. Without material, the map is fiction.
On the board: the four quadrants (says, thinks, does, feels) and the pains / gains strip at the bottom, with a photo or name of the segment at the top.
Agenda
5 min
Set the scene Name the segment and the moment you are mapping: 'a first-time admin setting up the workspace on day one'. Write it at the top of the board.
15 min
Watch or read the material Play two interview extracts or read three tickets aloud. Everyone writes what they notice on stickies, one observation each, without discussing.
10 min
Fill says and does Post the observable facts: exact words heard, actions seen. Only things you could have recorded on camera.
15 min
Fill thinks and feels Now the inferences: what they probably think, what they feel. Mark each with a question mark if it is a guess. Guesses become interview questions.
10 min
Pains and gains From the four quadrants, pull the top 3 pains and top 3 gains. Vote if there are more than five candidates.
5 min
Name the surprise Each person says one thing they did not expect. Write those down; they are the most valuable output of the hour.
Pitfalls
If nobody has material, do not run the session. An empathy map filled from imagination is worse than no map: it feels like research.
Keep 'says' to actual words. Paraphrases lose the signal that tells you how users name things.
Do not let the loudest person dictate 'feels'. Silent writing first, then posting, always.
Afterwards
The pains and gains feed the Value Proposition Canvas or the How Might We questions. The question-marked stickies become the script of your next interviews. Keep the map next to the persona it belongs to.